Maxwell Smart, Agent 86, (Don Adams) with his trademark shoe phone.Get Smart was an American comedy television series that ran from September 18, 1965 to May 1970, and from January to February 1995. It satirized the secret agent genre, which was quite popular in the late 1960s. It ran on the NBC television network from 1965 to 1969, on CBS from 1969 to 1970, and on Fox in 1995, airing a total of 145 episodes.

The series, written and created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, won seven Emmy Awards and was nominated for an additional fourteen Emmys and two Golden Globe Awards.

Two movie versions were produced years after the end of the NBC/CBS run of the TV series: the theatrically released The Nude Bomb (also known as The Return of Maxwell Smart or Maxwell Smart and the Nude Bomb) in 1980 and the made-for-TV Get Smart, Again! in 1989. The latter aired on ABC, making Get Smart the only television franchise to air new episodes on four different American television networks.

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Stars

Barbara Feldon, as Agent 99 of Control.The series starred Don Adams as bumbling secret agent Maxwell Smart, Agent 86. Barbara Feldon's character had no name; even after Smart married her, he (and everyone else) would always address her as "99". (In one episode she said that her name was "Susan Hilton" but she later claimed that it was an alias [1].) Smart and 99 worked for CONTROL, a secret U.S. Government spy agency. Together, the pair investigated and opposed various threats to the world while Smart's bumbling caused complications. However, at each story's climax, Smart and 99 never fail to save the day. (In "The Nude Bomb", Max worked for the PITS — Provisional Intelligence Tactical Service, and by this time, his shoe phone was Touch Tone.)

The nemesis of CONTROL was KAOS, and KAOS' Vice President of Public Relations and Terror, Siegfried (Bernie Kopell), showed up often as Maxwell Smart's worst enemy.

Other characters included the Chief of CONTROL, whose first name was once revealed as Thaddeus but who was always addressed as Chief (Edward Platt); when the Chief was an agent, they used letters and he was Agent Q; Hymie the Robot (Dick Gautier), a powerful android who tended to take orders too literally; Agent 13 (Dave Ketchum), who was forever being stationed inside weird places such as mailboxes, washing machines, lockers, and other objects; Agent 44 (Victor French), who regularly suffered the same fate as Agent 13; Agent Larrabee (Robert Karvelas), the Chief's assistant; and Shtarker (King Moody), Siegfried's chief henchman.

The number 86 for Smart was presumably chosen because it was bartenders' slang for not serving an inebriated customer, having been derived from clerks' slang for "We're all out of the item ordered." One explanation of the origin of that usage is that 86 was rhyming slang for "nix". [2]

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Distinctive sayings
Many catch phrases and schticks have endured:

Max: (After causing yet another disaster for the Chief) "Sorry about that, Chief."
Max: "Would you believe. . .?" Smart used this routine whenever he found himself in a tight spot and hoped to bluff his way out of it. For example, Max would say: "You might as well surrender, because at this very moment, you are being surrounded by 5,000 crack Swiss troops." - "I find that very hard to believe, Mr Smart." - "Oh. Well, would you believe 150 Tyrolean skijumpers?" - "No, I wouldn't." - "How 'bout two St. Bernards in heat?"
Chief: "Now listen carefully ... [long list of directions to a secret rendezvous or some such] ... did you get that?" Max: "Not all of it." Chief: "Which part didn't you get?" Max: "The part after 'Now listen carefully'."
Max: "Missed it by that much."
Max: "Don't tell me [he made yet another mistake and when his compatriot confirms it, he responds...] I asked you not to tell me that."
99: "Max!" (cry of anguish)
Max: "The old...[complicated explanation]...trick" (often followed by "that's the second time this month")
Chief/99/somebody else: "Max, you'll be in extreme danger every minute!" Max: "...and loving it!"
Max: "That's the second biggest ...(whatever)... I've ever seen."
Siegfried: (usually to silence his sidekick, Shtarker who is doing something silly) "Shtarker! Zis is KAOS, Ve don't... [whatever it was he was doing]... here!"
Max: "Good thinking, 99." [Used by Max to congratulate 99 on a statement of the obvious as if she was learning deduction and logic from him. The implication was that she was just catching up to his thought processes, when in fact the expression on his face showed that he was embarrassed that he hadn't worked it out himself already.]
Max: "Yes, well..." (often followed by an explanation; Max frequently began his responses to others' questions or comments in this way)
After calling a villain's henchman a disparaging name (e.g. "dummy") and attempting to overpower him with a series of karate chops or punches that have no affect whatsoever, Max would playfully tap the henchman's shoulder and say with a friendly smile: "Say, I hope I wasn't out of line with that crack about 'dummy'"!?
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Gadgets
Smart would communicate with CONTROL using a rotary telephone concealed in his shoe. While it is decades ahead of its time in real life, the need to take off his shoe to use it and the loud bell among other design flaws lead to various humorously awkward situations. The term "shoe phone" has returned to currency as a slang expression for a handheld cellular telephone.

Smart would always insist on following the rules and, when in the Chief's office, would insist on speaking under the Cone of Silence. One of the show's recurring gags, the Cone of Silence was two transparent plastic hemispheres which were electrically lowered on top of Smart and the Chief, and which invariably malfunctioned, such that the characters wound up shouting in order to be understood by each other. At least one time, the device worked so badly that an outside observer, who could hear everything spoken inside, had to relay messages to the people inside because they couldn't hear them themselves. The 1989 reunion movie revealed that Max and 99 had purchased a surplus Cone and placed it over their bed; it still didn't work.

The AMT Corporation, a major producer of model car kits, produced a replica of the Sunbeam Tiger roadster Smart drove in the opening credits. Complete with a cache of hidden weapons, it is the only kit of the Tiger produced to date and is highly coveted by collectors. The start of the 1968 season put Smart in another Carroll Shelby creation, a Shelby GT-500 convertible with a variation of the shoe phone, namely a giant rotary telephone dial covering the steering wheel.

Communication devices have been hidden in other contraptions: once, the chief used the hour and minute hands of a clock (detached from the clock face) to communicate; once, Max had to use the Bunsen burner that the phone was hidden in, with the flame as the microphone, but he had to put Code P into effect, and he kept "disconnecting" when saying "P".

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Spies at work
CONTROL and KAOS didn't seem to be above everyday bureaucracy. KAOS is a Delaware corporation for tax purposes. The Guild of Surviving Control Agents is the union at CONTROL, and Max is their negotiator; he learns from a dying KAOS agent about all the benefits that KAOS agents have for their families as beneficiaries with the Chief in their presence and Max uses that information for his labor talks there and then.

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Other Get Smart productions
Adams again played a bumbling secret agent in the animated series Inspector Gadget and its prequel series Gadget Boy and Heather, which were not related to Get Smart. He also portrayed Maxwell Smart in a series of TV commercials in New Zealand for the Toyota Starlet in the late 1980s and in another series of popular Canadian ones in the late 1990s for a dial-around long distance carrier.

Smart and Agent 99 married near the end of the series, and she gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl. The short-lived 1995 Fox revival starred Andy Dick as one of the twins, Zachary Smart, who was every bit the bumbler as his father. Despite appearances by Adams and Feldon, the show failed to recapture the spirit of the original.

A new big-screen version of Get Smart is in production, starring Steve Carell as Maxwell Smart.

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“...I realized I had to gain more knowledge to protect against evil and to protect myself from not becoming evil myself. This is our major goal in life...\" Terry Lee